Heroku Now Supports New PHP, Draws On Innovation From Facebook

Heroku recently announced full support for the new PHP. It did so during Facebook’s f8 conference, drawing on Facebook’s PHP innovation.

As Heroku notes, the new PHP is built on new runtimes and frameworks, while utilizing familiar aspects of the lagnauge and best practices of other modern frameworks. Heroku made available native HipHop support, packaging and first class frameworks, and Heroku XL support in public beta.

“At the foundation of the new PHP is Facebook’s HipHop VM, a modern, high-performance runtime for PHP that promises orders of magnitude speed improvements while retaining compatibility,” Heroku’s Craig Kerstiens wrote. “With help from the Facebook team, this VM is now available as part of the Heroku buildpack, so developers can quickly deploy their PHP code onto this new VM just as they would Rails or Python. Specifying running with the traditional VM or HHVM is now a trivial switch for PHP apps on Heroku.”

“Declarative and explicit dependency management is a core facet of building apps in this new world. This ensures: A clean development pipeline; Ease in onboarding new developers to your project; Parity between development and production closer thus making running production apps easier,” says Kerstiens. “This form of structured dependency management has been available in other Heroku supported languages for years, and now PHP via Composer has copied the best of breed from all of them. Further the new PHP brings with it many new frameworks such as Symfony and Laravel which bring forward this new type of development.”

Dependency management anew the newer frameworks, he says, help to better deliver apps quickly and predictably maintained and scaled on Heroku.